The Smallest Minority

As predicted by Alexis deToqueville:

You take a conventional man of action, and he’s satisfied if you obey, eh? But not the intellectual. He doesn’t want you just to obey. He wants you to get down on your knees and praise the one who makes you love what you hate and hate what you love. In other words, whenever the intellectuals are in power, there’s soul-raping going on. – Eric Hoffer

This is one of the most horrific things I think I’ve ever read, but more people need to read it, all the way to the end. To Shatter Men’s Souls – John Carter’s Substack

I wrote this one six years ago – “What are the origins of gun control/the anti-gun movement? How, and why, did it start?”

Historically? Settle in, this will take a few minutes.

Despite the brilliant and inspiring words of Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, prior to the establishment of the American form of Constitutional Republicanism governments were not instituted among men to secure their unalienable rights. Instead, governments were established to protect and expand the power and privilege of the powerful and privileged – and for no other reason.

As Mao observed in the early 20th Century, “all political power grows from the barrel of a gun,” but prior to the invention of firearms political power still sprouted from coercive force and the tools of that coercive force. In order to maintain and expand the power and privilege of the powerful and privileged the concept of a monopoly of the legitimate use of force was conceived, though it wasn’t codified until the late 16th or early 17th Century. The book World History of Warfare notes:

One frequently quoted letter from the second invasion (of Korea by Japan) comes from Asano Yukinaga, who wrote to his father in Japan in 1598 after surviving a bitter siege by Chinese and Koreans in Uru-san: “When troops come [to Korea] from the province of Kai, have them bring as many guns as possible, for no other equipment is needed. Give strict orders that all men, even the samurai, carry guns.” Despite these progressive sentiments, the forth stage of Japanese warfare emerged when, starting with Hideyoshi and carrying on through the rule of Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616), who was proclaimed shogun in 1603, firearms were forcibly withdrawn from general use. In fact, in a series of stages, Japan was disarmed in order to create a strong central government without fear of rebellions and at the same time preserving a sharper distinction between samurai and farmer. Hideyoshi originally issued the order for a “sword hunt” in August 1588 with the overt intention of building a vast Great Buddha but actually intending to disarm the country: “The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, short swords, bows, spears, firearms or other types of arms. The possession of unnecessary implements [of war] makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues and tends to foment uprisings….”

So “gun control” has a long and storied history, as does its implementation by deceit. Not long after the establishment of the United States, one of the foremost legal minds of that day wrote a review of American Constitutional Law, giving homage to a similar work done in England by Sir William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England published in 1765. St. George Tucker published his American expansion on Blackstone’s Commentaries in 1803. It became the go-to text for American law schools. In Tucker’s Blackstone he wrote about our right to arms:

This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty. . . . The right of self defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction. In England, the people have been disarmed, generally, under the specious pretext of preserving the game: a never failing lure to bring over the landed aristocracy to support any measure, under that mask, though calculated for very different purposes. True it is, their bill of rights seems at first view to counteract this policy: but the right of bearing arms is confined to protestants, and the words suitable to their condition and degree, have been interpreted to authorise the prohibition of keeping a gun or other engine for the destruction of game, to any farmer, or inferior tradesman, or other person not qualified to kill game. So that not one man in five hundred can keep a gun in his house without being subject to a penalty.

“Gun control” is now sold as a public safety issue, though we know from history what a world without guns is really like – it’s run by large men with other weapons, and is not particularly safe, free, or equal. If guns are restricted only to government, well, that makes the collection of taxes much easier, and the powerful and privileged get to keep (and expand) their power and privilege without concern for the feelings of the peasants.

As the meme goes, “I saw a movie once where only the government had guns. It was called ‘Schindler’s List’.”

“Gun control” isn’t about guns. It isn’t about “safety.” It’s about control.

Someone once said words to the effect that you can pass any law you like, but understand that it can be enforced by your worst enemy.

This is perhaps the most vile thing I’ve seen bragged about by an elected official.

This is what a Kamala Harris presidency would be.

My answer to” “Why do many people still believe in communism even though it has been proven throughout history that it does not work?”

Because the idea is beautiful. Everyone equal. No one wants for anything. “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” Who can’t get behind that?

I see in several of the previous answers the standard objection of “That wasn’t REAL Communism!!” Except Marx himself explained the process: violent revolution by the workers who seize the “means of production,” followed by Socialism – “dictatorship of the Proletariat” – as necessary intermediate steps towards eventual Utopia.

It’s that “dictatorship of the Proletariat” where everything – always – goes to hell. It’s the Underpant Gnomes theory of politics. What Marx neglected to recognize was human nature – when you put that much power into the hands of a very few people, the people who wield that power tend to be the ones you’d rather not. To achieve that power they have to be most probably sociopaths. And to maintain that power, they will be more than willing to kill anyone who threatens that power.

It became apparent by the 1960’s that there was a major problem with Marx’s theory. Philosopher Stephen Hicks in a lecture on Postmodernism explained:

(A)ll Postmodernists, to a man and woman, are Socialists, and fairly far Left Socialist. And that’s a problem because if you would start from Subjectivism, you would expect people to be making commitments all over the map. Instead what we find is that the commitments are narrowly directed to one part of the political spectrum, and so there’s got to be another factor here to explain this.

Now, another part of the problem (is) that Socialism has traditionally been defended on Modernist grounds. The claim was that Socialism was provable by the evidence, by logic. So what you have then is a shift, a major shift in strategy from Modernist epistemological groundings for Socialism, to Socialism being part of this highly relativistic Postmodern strategy. The question is, why is this the case?

Since Socialism was put forth on Modernist grounds, this meant that it made, in effect, a number of core assertions, or key propositions that it thought would be provable by evidence and logic. If you asks Socialists to defend Socialism they will typically offer two strands of argument. One is a more moral strand. They will argue a pair of theses, one that Capitalism is deeply immoral, and then there are a number of reasons why it is immoral: It is exploitative, the rich get rich off the backs of the poor – they enslave them, it’s warlike as part of its imperialistic mission and so forth. Socialism by contrast is humane, it’s peaceful, everybody gets a share, everyone shares, it’s cooperative, as opposed to the brutal competition that’s characteristic of Capitalism. That’s the first two.
The Economic wing of argument is that Capitalism ultimately is unproductive. It’s doing pretty good so far, but because of its internal contradictions and problems it will ultimately collapse. It will sow the seeds of its own destruction. Socialist economies by contrast will be more productive, and they will usher in a new era of prosperity.

Now this then means that Socialism has made some definite theses that can then be tested against the evidence, and be given logical scrutiny. The problem then is that every single one of these claims has been extensively refuted both in theory and in practice. We’ve had over a hundred years of Socialist argumentation, several Socialist experiments, and in each case they reached dismal failure. And it’s brutal, at least from our perspective, how thoroughly Socialism has been discredited. In theory, if you focus on the free-market economists, people like Mises, Hayek and Friedman, have made the case. They’ve shown how markets are more efficient, and they’ve shown conversely how Socialist Command economies are bound to fail, necessarily. They have to. Distinguished Socialists such as Robert Heilbroner have conceded, in print, that that debate is over, and that Mises and Hayek won.

In theory the political debate is a little bit more up for grabs, but the leading thesis, I think at least in my reading, is that some form of liberalism is the leading contender. That if you’re going to protect human rights in some broad form, you’ve got to have some form of liberalism, whether it’s a more conservative version or a more communitarian version or a more libertarian version, that’s where the debate is. It’s all shifted to there. The empirical evidence has been much harder on Socialism than the theoretical debate. Economically in practice every single Socialistic country has failed, and failed dismally, and in practice every country that is by and large Capitalist has become prosperous, and increasingly prosperous, and there’s no end in sight here.

Politically, in practice, every single Capitalistic country has a good record on human rights issues, in respecting rights and freedoms, by and large making it possible for people to put together meaningful, fruitful lives. Socialism has, time and time again, proved to be more brutal than the worst dictatorships in history. Every Socialist regime has collapsed into dictatorship, and starts killing people on an unprecedented scale. Every single one produces dissident writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Nien Cheng who document from a first-hand perspective what exactly goes on.

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(W)hat kind of a psychological impact the sum total of this, the refutation in theory, in practice, in politics and economics must have had on a Socialist, a True Believer Socialist? By the 1960’s there had been over a hundred years of argumentation in economics and in politics, and the Socialists could sense that they were losing. By the 1960’s it was clear that the great Socialist experiments were failing nastily. So put yourself in the shoes of a smart, more or less open-to-the-evidence Socialist, and you’re confronted with all of this data. How do you react? You’ve got a deep commitment to Socialism, you feel that it’s true, you WANT it to be true. You’ve pinned all of your dreams of a peaceful and a prosperous society on Socialism, and all of your hopes for curing any ills that you see in current society.

Now this is a moment of truth for anyone who has experienced the agony of a deeply cherished hypothesis run aground on the rocks of reality. What do you do? Do you abandon your theory and go with the facts, or do you try to find a way to maintain your theory and your belief in it?

I think in the 1960’s the academic Left was facing the same dilemma that religious thinkers were facing in the late 1700’s. In both cases the evidence was overwhelmingly against them. During the Enlightenment, religion’s natural theology arguments were widely seen as being full of holes, and science was rapidly filling the gap. It was giving naturalistic and opposite explanations for the kinds of things that religion had traditionally explained. Religion was in danger of being laughed out of intellectual debate. By the 1960’s the Left’s arguments for the fruitfulness and decency of Socialism were failing in theory and practice, and Capitalism was rapidly increasing everyone’s standard of living and showing itself respectful of human freedoms.

By the late 1700’s religious thinkers had a choice – accept evidence and logic as the ultimate court of appeals, and thereby reject their deeply held religious ideals, or – and here’s the strategy – you can reject the idea that logic and evidence are the ultimate court of appeal.

“I had to deny knowledge” wrote Kant in The Critique, “in order to make room for faith.” “Faith,” writes Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling, “requires the crucifixion of reason.” And so they proceeded to do that, and glorify the irrational.

The Left thinkers of the 1960’s faced the same choice. Confronted by the continuing flourishing of Capitalism and the continued poverty and brutality (of Socialism), they decided, like Kant, to limit reason, to try to crucify it. And so Heidigger coming along and exalting feeling over reason is a godsend. Kuhn‘s theory-laden paradigms, Quine‘s pragmatic and internalist account of language and logic do the same thing.

So the idea here is that the dominance in the Academy of skeptical and irrationalist epistemologies provides the academic Left with a new strategy. Confronted by ruthless logic, harsh evidence, they have a solution: “That’s only logic and evidence. Logic and evidence are subjective. You can’t really PROVE anything. FEELINGS are deeper than logic, and my feelings say Socialism.”

That’s my second hypothesis about the origins of Postmodernism. I call it the Kierkegaardian hypothesis, that Postmodernism is the crisis of faith of the academic Left. Its epistemology justifies taking a personal leap of faith in continuing to believe your Socialist ideals.

Communism is no longer an economic theory. It has failed utterly at that. It’s now a religion. And it’s proselytized in our education systems.

I have neglected this site for quite a while, and thought it would be a good idea to post something, so here are a couple of my answers to questions posted at Quora:

What, in your opinion, are the most fundamental features that characterize left and right wing ideologies?

Thomas Sowell wrote an entire book on this topic, entitled A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. I strongly recommend this book.

Going back as far as Aristotle and Plato, Professor Sowell explains that a social vision “is our sense of how the world works.” It has been described, he says, “as a ‘pre-analytic cognitive act.’ It is what we sense or feel before we have constructed any systematic reasoning that could be called a theory, much less deduced any specific consequences as a hypothesis to be tested against evidence.” Visions are crucial, because they are “the foundations on which theories are built.” BUT: “The final structure depends not only on the foundation, but also on how carefully and consistently the framework of theory is constructed and how well buttressed it is with hard facts.”

The two visions he calls the Constrained and Unconstrained. The Constrained vision is one that – at the extreme – sees the nature of Man as unchanging. Humanity has flaws and is not “fixable.” We have to live with what we were born with and hopefully train ourselves to be better, knowing that our actual nature is always there. The Unconstrained vision, Sowell says (quoting William Godwin from his 1793 book Enquiry Concerning Political Justice) is one in which “man (is) capable of directly feeling other people’s needs as more important than his own, and therefore of consistently acting impartially, even when his own interests or those of his family were involved.” In short, humanity can be perfected.

Those of the Constrained vision understand that some people can be right bastards, and a few downright evil. Best to do whatever is possible to keep those people from being able to do bad things should they reach the levers of power.

Those of the Unconstrained vision believe that we can achieve Utopia, we just have to put the RIGHT PEOPLE in charge to lead us to that promised land.

Earlier someone asked what the Republican End Game for the United States was. Charles Tips answered, I think accurately, that the Republicans don’t have an “endgame” in mind. The so-called “Right Wing” is happy with things now and the progress we have made and are continuing to make. The “Progressive” Left, on the other hand, has a goal, and that goal is Utopic. The Left is never happy, because they have not yet achieved that Utopia. And as someone observed, Utopia is always just one more mass murder away.

Always.

How can I force the Trump voters in my city to give up their guns?

Well, Caleb, there’s an essay floating around out there you probably ought to read. It’s called “Why the Gun is Civilization” and it’s written by a gentleman by the name of Marko Kloos. Marko is a first-generation immigrant to the US. You can read the essay here, but here’s the opening:

Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that’s it.

In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.

When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force. The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gangbanger, and a single gay guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.

Now, look at your question: “How can I force the Trump voters in my city to give up their guns?”

You can’t. That’s why they own guns. You have to REASON with them, and you’ve already acknowledged that reason isn’t an option for you. Because they have reasoned that if you’re willing to use force to disarm them, you’re willing to use force to do a lot worse. And they want the ability to say “NO” and make it stick.

Public Intellectual Eric Weinstein (originator of the “Intellectual Dark Web” moniker) recently appeared on Chris Williamson’s podcast, titled “Compete Systemic Collapse” It’s a three-and-a-half hour podcast, but the first twelve minutes are truly exceptional. I’ve transcribed it:

Eric Weinstein: “I don’t know whether Donald Trump will be allowed to become President. I think that there’s a remarkable story and we’re in a funny game, which is “Are we allowed to say what that story is?” Because to say it, to analyze it, to name it is to bring it, uh, into view. I think we don’t understand why the censorship is behaving the way it is. We don’t understand why it’s in the shadows. We don’t understand why our news is acting in a bizarre fashion. Let’s just set the stage. Given that that was in February, um, there is something that I think Mike Benz has referred to as “The rules-based international order.” It’s an interlocking series of agreements, tacit understandings, explicit understandings, clandestine understandings, about how the most important structures keep the world free of war and keep markets open.

“And there has been a system in place, whether understood explicitly or behind the scenes, or implicitly that says the purpose of the two American parties is to prune the field of populist candidate so that whenever two candidates exist in a faceoff, both are acceptable to the world order. So what you’re trying to do from the point of view, let’s take it from the point of view of the State Department, the Intelligence community, the Defense Department and major corporations that have to do with international issues from arms trade to, oh I don’t know, food, they have a series of agreements that are fragile and could be overturned if a President entered the Oval Office that didn’t agree with them and the mood of the country was “Why do we pay taxes into these structures, why are we hamstrung, why aren’t we a free people?”

“So what the two parties would do is, they would run Primaries. You’d have populist candidates, and you’d pre-commit the populist candidates to support the candidates that won the Primaries. As long as that took place, and you had two candidates that were both acceptable to the international order, that is they’re not going to re-order NAFTA or NATO or what have you, we called that “Democracy.” So Democracy was the illusion of choice, what’s called “Magician’s choice,” where the choice is not actually – you know, “Pick a card, any card” but somehow the magician makes sure that the card you pick is the one that he knows.

“In that situation you have Magician’s Choice in the primaries, and then you’d have the duopoly field two candidates either of which was acceptable, and you could actually accept to afford to hold an election. And the populace would vote and that way the international order wasn’t put at risk every four years because you can’t have alliances that are subject to the whim of, uhm, the people in plebiscites.

“So, under that structure everything was going fine ’til 2016, and then the first candidate ever to not hold, um, any position in the military, nor position in government in the history of the Republic to enter the Oval Office, Donald Trump, broke through the Primary structure. So then there was a full-court press, “OK, we only have one candidate that’s acceptable to the International Order. Donald Trump will be under, um, constant pressure that he’s a loser, he’s a wild man, he’s an idiot, and he’s under the control of the Russians.” And then he was going to be, you know, a 20:1 underdog.

“And then he wins.

“And there was no precedent for this.

“They learned their lesson. You cannot afford to have candidates who are not acceptable to the international order and continue to have these alliances. This is an unsolved problem. So I don’t have a particular dog in this fight. I want to believe in Democracy, I also believe in international agreements, and it is the job of the State Department, the Intelligence community and the Defense Department to bring this problem in front of the American people, and say “You don’t know everything that’s going on, and if you start voting in populist candidates you’re going to end up knocking-out load-bearing walls that you don’t understand.”

Chris Williamson: “But Trump was in office four years. Did he turn the entire table upside down?”

Weinstein: “He risked doing that.”

Chris: “Say more.”

Weinstein: “You remember there was this uncomfortable accommodation given to the Central Intelligence Agency at the beginning of his actual term, there was a question about, um, was he going to question the – I’ve a very different point of view from most of my friends who were also at least nominally Democrats, which is it was a very immoral thing that was done to him. He was asked the question, “Will you pre-commit that you will accept the result of an election?”

“Now if you’re going to rig an election, you would ask somebody that to begin with, and that’s part of the game, and he says, “Well, you know, we’ll see.” So, you have this very strange going on where Democracy is the greatest threat to Democracy. How can that be? It’s two different concepts of Democracy. One concept of Democracy is the Will of the People. You hold plebiscites, and even if you do it with an Electoral College, the political parties, the idea is that the people are elec…, by and of and for the people. The other idea of Democracy is that Democracy is about institutions that sprang from Democracy once upon a time, and that those institutions have to be kept strong. Those are two completely different concepts that are overloaded to the same word.

“Under that circumstance we have a paradox which is “How do we keep the electorate from overturning the – you know – the Type A Democracy from overturning the Type B Democracy. And that is the unsolved problem that they will not bring in front of the People. So what you have is the situation in which I believe there are many people in Washington, D.C. who think that Donald Trump cannot become President because he can now go for broke. He also is not going to run for re-election. He’s relatively unconstrained. He’s wealthy, he’s, uh, learned how to play a lot of these games.

Chris: “He’s also got a bit of an axe to grind after the last six years.”

Weinstein: “No kidding. And he’s a wild card. You know, there’s three people who are doing amazing versions of the drunken boxing game. Kanye, who’s probably the first one to really fail, Elon and Donald Trump. And all three of them tried to do something. We couldn’t pin them down, you couldn’t figure out what they were going to do next. And that’s what the Orders keep trying to do. “Will you commit to this, will you say this, will you mouth these words?” And none of these people would play the game.

I find this all – you ever see Emmanuel Agustus, this boxer who actually, you know, I think Floyd M – anyway he said this was his toughest opponent because he just, he wouldn’t fight in a style that anyone could recognize.

Chris: “Unpredictable.”

Weinstein: “And the most entertaining boxer I’ve ever seen in my life. I mean just check out any highlight reel and you won’t even believe this is real. It doesn’t seem possible. So that’s what Donald Trump is. He’s a guy who’s got formulas that confuse people like Sam Harris. And Sam and I have been debating this for years. I think that Trump is an incredibly intelligent man, and that there’s incredible method in his Tweets, uh, of old. You can put them into a dataset, and you say that there’s five or six different types of Tweets and that the Left falls for every one of them, every time.

“So in this situation, you have a question: How is it that Donald Trump and RFK Jr. cannot possibly reach the Oval Office and we have to have a candidate who is pre-subscribed to perpetuating these institutions, these agreements and these orders?

“And there’s only one out of three who has that character, and that person has not won a Primary. Right now we have no idea who’s running the United States of America. I just came here in a Tesla, and I did not steer once. And I would say America is in full self-driving mode, and we don’t know what the AI is that’s running the Oval Office, and that’s really bizarre given that we have something like six minutes to make a decision about nuclear launches. Uh, we have no idea what the United States government in the Executive Branch actually is. But it can’t be Joe Biden.”

Chris: “Every time it seems that an election has happened over the last decade or so, it’s always been “This one is different, this is the most important, this is the most important.” Is there something different about the one we’re about to go into? How should we think about this election?”

Weinstein: “As World War II unraveled, the order that has has produced the illusion of peace for this length of time, imagine that you were let’s say in the 2000s, that you had this thing called The Great Moderation, there was this story that we had finally banned volatility from the markets. None of that was true. What you’re doing was you were going farther and farther into a regime without understanding that sooner or later the Jenga tower has to collapse. The order that was put in place at the end of World War II, none of its architects are still alive. Very few pieces of information were passed down about what it actually is, or how it functions, because it’s secret. And I think what you can say is that, um, we’re now living on the fumes built from that victory. Uh, that is what is unravelling. You’re about to head towards a multi-polar world where the Game Theory in the dyadic game of two players doesn’t look remotely like the Game Theory in a five or ten player game.

“So Kamala is essentially the youngest boomer possible, and she’s tied to the last Silent Generation President we’ll ever have, which is bizarre to begin with. And she’s pre-committed to try to continue that order in the guise of an alternatively woke Wall Street-friendly, Indian, Black, folksy, I don’t even know what she is. To quote the great Chris Swanson, “She’s a meme of a meme of a meme.” That was from our last talk, and I would say this is probably the most insane election we’ve ever seen by a comfortable margin. I would say that there’s no one in second place. Uh, I can’t think of another election that is even close to this bizarre. Including the attempted assassination on Donald Trump.”

Here’s the whole podcast: